ALB
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By coincidence it’s today that the Supreme Court is beginning an oral hearing on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. In theory they could strike it down but they are not expected to do so. This seems to be another party political scare story.
It is not even clear that this is what the Republican Party really want. From today’s Guardian:
”Many conservative legal scholars have said the legal argument for dismantling the entire law is weak and during the Coney Barrett deliberations, several Republicans insisted the law would not be struck down. In October, the nation’s highest-ranking Republican after Trump, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said: “No one believes the supreme court is going to strike down the Affordable Care Act.”
We shall see.
For once LT has posted something relatively rational and seems to know what he is talking about. More detail than me anyway but we have never said scrap Obamacare any more than we have say scrap the NHS in Britain.
We recognise that some reforms can benefit workers at least for a while and a health service free to patients is one such reform. Obamacare of course doesn’t offer this but is about a subsidised private health care insurance for all but at least it is better than nothing. Needless to say both schemes are subject to the monetary cost considerations since they have to subsidised from taxes that in the end fall on capitalist profits.
I don’t think that Trump or the Republicans want to abolish subsidised health care in the US or scrap so-called Obamacare completely. They want to save costs by cutting the subsidies and making it pay its way more through increased premiums and reduced coverage. Just as have Conservative and Labour governments here over the years, introducing prescriptions charges and payment for dental services. That’s what you’d expect under capitalism since it exists for the benefit of the capitalist class not the working class.
LT supports some improvements to Obamacare to catch up with more efficient health care systems in Europe, Canada, etc. Good luck to him. We are not opposed to them. Workers should except whatever crumbs they are offered however meagre.
But rather than campaign for bigger crumbs they would be better advised to campaign for the whole bakery (and the fields where the wheat is grown, etc). That way there can be a completely free health service and one not subject to capitalist tax-saving considerations and pressures.
More on what individual states can do to expand those covered by subsidised health insurance:
https://ballotpedia.org/Healthcare_on_the_ballot
I didn’t know that this was possible but this is one thing where the USA is more formally democratic than many other countries. Of course voting for something is one thing, getting it implemented is another in the context of capitalism and its profit priorities.
According to John Prideaux, the US editor of the Economist, writing in today’s Times:
”Mr Biden pledged to patch up the health care law signed by Barak Obama in 2009, bringing America closer to the universal coverage that has long been the norm in other rich countries. That will not happen. His administration won’t actively undermine Obamacare, but the changes he can make will be marginal.”
He goes on to make the point that on health care the individual states “have a lot of latitude” and that, with regard to Obamacare,
”a number of Republican-leaning states took advantage of that law to cover more people (Utah, Idaho and Nebraska have all done so this year).”
Of course wars will continue as long as capitalism, so we can say that war is inevitable under capitalism. But the question was whether another world-wide war like the two in the last century was. To which the answer is not so clear.
The consensus wasn’t that a Third World War wasn’t possible but that it wasn’t likely which, I suppose, means that it wasn’t a “distinct” possibility. Let’s hope you’re wrong.
Are you sure? If you are referring to this it’s the other way round:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/254120/less-half-vote-socialist-president.aspx
So no need for us to soft-pedalling our opposition to all religion.
Also, it looks as if US soccer hooligans would chant “I’d rather be a Muslim than a Socialist”.
A lot of campaigning for socialism needed over there, then.
I don’t think we were “praising” Sanders for that, were we, or even attributing it to him? We were just noting that the word “socialism” was ceasing to be a dirty word in the US, especially amongst young people, and that this gave us a foot in the door to put over our case and what we mean by socialism.
We never accepted that Sanders was actually a socialist. He only claims to stand for what many Americans think exists in Sweden.
I know you think that if Sanders had won the Democratic Party nomination he’d now be the President-elect. But I don’t think the popularity of the word “socialism” has spread to the extent that someone calling themselves a socialist could be elected President!
Some Democrats don’t agree with AOC and her analysis. According to today’s Times of London, the party’s chief whip in the House of Representatives, Jaime Harrison, told the Andrew Marr show on the BBC yesterday:
“The issue of socialism and ‘defund the police’ was a big problem for Joe Biden in this election.”
Representative Abigail Spanberger is quoted as saying:
“We need not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
I think we can agree with her on that. We don’t want members of the Democratic Party claiming to be socialists when they are only leftwing reformists.
Isn’t Turkey involved in all this? Articles like this one use words like “oil-rich”, “pipelines” and “geopolitical influence”:
As DJP pointed out earlier: If you think something is a “lesser evil” then you must also think it is an “evil” and presumably you won’t be surprised when it does “evil” things.
Lesser-evilism reduces political action not even to trying to improve things gradually but merely to trying to stop them getting as worse as they might be. It’s the politics of defeatism.
As the link I gave above puts it:
”the lesser evil calculus – the proposition that one must choose the candidate most likely to win who will do the least harm – continues to exert its pull. ‘Vote for me,’ says the ‘cholera’ candidate, ‘not because I have good policies but because I’m not the other guy, and the other guy, well, just look at him! You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, now would you?’ The pitch is as old as politics itself and a constant source of frustration to those who see the need for more than just piecemeal change. It is an appeal to fear, and a brake on real progress. ‘Don’t waste your vote on a principle,’ say the cholerites; ‘Don’t risk a bout of plague.’
There are a number of arguments that can and should be made against this kind of political blackmail. For one thing it leads to apathy and resignation; the lesser evil is still evil, after all, so in agreeing to support the cholera candidate one is sanctioning a view of politics as an essentially tragic and futile process – a deeply conservative sentiment.”
Statement from Maoists for Biden on his electoral victory that looks to have come from the planet Zanussi.
More on the choice between cholera and the plague.
It’s come up twice in France this century in the second round of presidential elections in France. The context of the first is well-explained in this article:
”When Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party candidate for the 2002 French Presidential election, unexpectedly finished in third place in the initial round of voting – behind the Gaullist conservative Jacques Chirac (first) and the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen (second) – progressive and leftwing voters in France were presented with a stark choice: should they support Chirac in the run-off or should they abstain from voting at all and risk a (still unlikely) victory for the Front National. Characterising the decision as a choice between ‘cholera and plague’, most progressives took the first option, often demonstrating their unhappiness by turning up to vote in rubber gloves and nose-pegs. One group of activists even set up a symbolic shower in a Paris square and invited Chirac voters to pass through it after voting.”
If Chomsky and the others who urged a vote for cholera had done this when they went to vote for it, then we might have a little more respect for them. But they didn’t out of fear that some people might not want cholera or were indifferent between dying of that and dying of the plague. So they played down the effects of cholera and exaggerated the effects of the plague (likely fascist coup).
Here’s a newspaper headline from 2002. The issue came up again in 2017 when the run-off was between the current French President Macron and Le Pen’s daughter Marine.
